FBI sued over secretive mass surveillance program

A privacy watchdog group is suing the FBI over the agency’s failure to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests for documents involving a secretive and expansive database that could be used to track down anyone, anywhere and at any time.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the
complaint [PDF] in United States District Court for the
District of Columbia on Monday, suing the Federal Bureau of
Investigation for failing to comply with a pair of FOIA request
placed more than six months ago.

Last September, EPIC asked the FBI to explain their “Next Generation Identification,” or “NGI” program, a
system that’s been building a database of biometric data such as
DNA profiles, mug shots and iris scans in order to give law
enforcement the ability to track down suspects without relying on
more archaic methods. In 2012 the FBI said NGI is already more than
60 percent complete, and Assistant Director Tom Bush of the
agency’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division said it
will be “bigger, faster, and better” than the Integrated
Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) currently in
place.

“Bigger,” the FBI wrote on their website in 2009,
“because it will increase the capacity of our fingerprint
storage plus house multimodal biometrics records like palm prints
and iris scans,” all the while leaving room to accommodate for
tracking methods that have yet to be perfected, such as voice
analysis. Once the program is fully rolled out, the FBI says they
should be able to narrow in on suspects in a matter of only 10
minutes.

The FBI doesn’t want NGI to pull data from just criminal
databases, though. Because the agency wants NGI to work with public
and private surveillance cameras around the country — of which EPIC
estimates there are around 30 million in use at this time — the
targets of investigation might not necessarily be the bad guys.

“The Department of Homeland Security has expended hundreds of
millions of dollars to establish state and local surveillance
systems, including CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras that
record the routine activities of millions of individuals,” EPIC
writes. “The NGI system could be integrated with other
surveillance technology, such as Trapwire, that would enable
real-time image-matching of live feeds from CCTV surveillance
cameras.”

Trapwire, a spy system uncovered by RT last year while analyzing
emails hacked emails obtained from the Stratfor private
intelligence firm, has already been sold to cities across the US
including Washington, DC and New York, and lets customers scan the
faces of people caught on surveillance cameras in only seconds.
“TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior
patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you
connect the dots over time and distance,” the company said.

And although the FBI publically disclosed their NGI program for
the first time nearly a decade ago, the agency has been unwilling
this far to honor EPIC’s request for information. The NGI system
will include facial recognition capabilities and will include
photographs and biometric identified of millions of individuals who
are neither criminals nor suspects, EPIC says, and the FBI has
already been attempting to import human statistics pulled from the
driver’s license profiles of residents in a number of states.

“The NGI database will include photographic images of
millions of individuals who are neither criminals nor
suspects,” write the attorneys for EPIC.

When EPIC attorney Ginger McCall sat down with Thom Hartmann in
2011 to discuss the NGI program on RT’s The Big Picture, she warned
of what could happen when the FBI accumulates vast troves of data
on people who, in some cases, aren’t even considered suspects in
crimes.

“The way that this new database will be set up, it will allow
for information to be input from state and local law
enforcement,” McCall said. “That information could be
brought in from commercial services; it could be brought in from
covert surveillance.”

“In the past,” added McCall, “the FBI has had a bit of
a problem. They’ve been putting in peaceful protesters and
classifying them — misclassifying them — as terrorists. So there’s
a lot of problems with these sorts of databases.”

Now half a year since EPIC first filed FOIA requests for records
relating to NFI as well as any contracts with commercial entities
and technical specifications, they are suing the FBI in order to
force them to follow through.

“Defendant has failed to comply with statutory deadlines, has
failed to grant expedited review of EPIC's FOIA Requests, and has
failed to disclose a single record. EPIC asks the Court to order
immediate disclosure of all responsive records and to provide other
appropriate relief as it may determine,” EPIC attorneys McCall,
Marc Rotenberg and David Brody write in the complaint, dated April
8, 2013.

“It’s very problematic from a privacy standpoint and a
freedom of expression standpoint,” McCall told Hartmann in
2011. “There’s a real chilling effect on freedom of expression
when you feel that you’re constantly being surveilled by the
government.”